Our say: Some cell tower disputes may not be worth it for schools

Signs opposing a cellphone tower proposed for the grounds of Shady Side Elementary school hang in the barn of Mike Shay earlier this month.

Signs opposing a cellphone tower proposed for the grounds of Shady Side Elementary school hang in the barn of Mike Shay earlier this month. (Rachael Pacella / Capital Gazette)

Sometimes, even when you have the data on your side, it’s prudent to bow to your neighbors’ concerns, just because they are your neighbors and you need their cooperation for other things.

That’s a point for Anne Arundel County’s school board to ponder as it considers an application by Verizon Wireless and Milestone Communications, a Virginia-based wireless tower developer, to put a 114-foot cellphone tower in the woods behind Shady Side Elementary School.

That plan, as reflected at a hearing last week, has run into heated opposition from the school community, as did Milestone’s ultimately abandoned effort to put a 99-foot tower at Piney Orchard Elementary School four years ago.

Yes, the opponents’ arguments that the tower might pose a health hazard lack virtually any scientific basis. And from the way some of them talk, you’d think Milestone was building an unshielded nuclear reactor next to the school. And yes, if the school board nixed the deal it would cost the system a relatively small amount of money.

But the board needs to think about whether that money is more important than antagonizing so many people, particularly at a close-knit school community like that of Shady Side Elementary, where parents feel a considerable ownership stake.

Such towers are going up nationwide. Milestone and similar companies prefer deals with school systems because they tend to have large, open properties in the middle of the populated areas that most need cellphone coverage.

Milestone’s deal with the county school system, struck five years ago, was renewed this summer. Building the tower would net the schools a $25,000 fee (a quarter of which would go to Shady Side Elementary itself), plus $5,000 for each carrier after the first added to the tower and 40 percent of gross monthly revenue. Since 2013, Milestone has put up towers at five county schools, none of them smaller than middle schools.

As is clear from the fact sheet on the American Cancer Society website, researchers who have gone looking for health effects from cellular phone towers haven’t found any — not surprising, as the non-ionizing radiation involved isn’t known to damage DNA and is too minimal to heat anything. And, as the website notes, “the amount of exposure from living near a cellphone tower is typically many times lower than the exposure from using a cellphone.”

Parents like those at Shady Side demand the alleged health damage be absolutely disproved — an impossibility, of course. And they expose their kids to an enormously higher, and quantifiable, risk of death or injury when they load them into a car to drive them somewhere, let alone when they allow them to ride bicycles or play certain sports.

But for all this, we’d be reluctant to override so much sincere parental opposition, just so the school system can pick up a little additional cash — and so Milestone can earn its share while, possibly, improving cellphone coverage on the Shady Side peninsula.

Perhaps the school system should at least consider redoing its deal with Milestone to rule out towers at elementary schools and limit them to the sort of larger facilities where they have been built so far.